1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing device and a medical image processing method, and particularly, to a medical image processing device and a medical image processing method which are capable of detecting a lesion site showing a red color.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in a medical field, observation with use of image pickup apparatuses such as an X-ray diagnostic apparatus, CT, MRI, an ultrasound observation apparatus and an endoscope apparatus has been widely performed. Of such image pickup apparatuses, an endoscope apparatus has, for example, an elongated insertion section which is inserted into a body cavity, and has the operation and configuration of picking up the image of the inside of a body cavity which is formed by an objective optical system disposed at the distal end portion of the insertion section by an image pickup unit such as a solid state image pickup element, outputting the image as an image pickup signal, and displaying the image of the inside of the body cavity on a display unit such as a monitor based on the image pickup signal. A user observes an organ and the like in the body cavity, for example, based on the image of the inside of the body cavity displayed on the display unit such as a monitor.
Further, the endoscope apparatus can directly pick up the image of the mucosa of a digestive tract. Therefore, the user can comprehensively observe various findings such as, for example, the color tone of a mucosa, shape of a lesion, and microscopic structures of the surface of a mucosa.
In recent years, as the image pickup apparatus which can be expected to have usefulness substantially the same as that of the aforementioned endoscope apparatus, for example, capsule type endoscope apparatuses have been proposed. A capsule type endoscope apparatus is generally configured by a capsule type endoscope which is disposed in a body cavity by being swallowed by a subject from his or her mouth, and transmits the image of the inside of the body cavity which is picked up to an outside as an image pickup signal, a receiver which receives the transmitted image pickup signal outside the body cavity, and thereafter, accumulates the received image pickup signal, and an observation device for observing the image of the inside of the body cavity based on the image pickup signal accumulated in the receiver.
Further, an endoscope apparatus also can detect a predetermined image including a bleeding site, by using the image processing method described in, for example, International Publication No. WO02/073507, as the image processing method capable of detecting a predetermined image including a lesion site such as a bleeding site.
The method for detecting calorimetric abnormalities within a living body which is the image processing method described in International Publication No. WO02/073507, is the method for making it possible to detect a predetermined image including a bleeding site by detecting a bleeding site for each divided region of the image based on the distance from each average value in the feature space in which the color tone is set as a feature value, by paying attention to the difference in color tone between a normal mucosa and a bleeding site.